David Brooks, writing in today’s Times, is right: the game has changed.
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days†era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.
But then he goes on, as he is wont to do:
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
Yoiks! The dudgeon’s as high as an elephant’s eye. Who says everyone really followed those “scripts,” or that they were the best or most effective ones in the first place? Aren’t new scripts, if imperfect ones, evolving right now? And who says we — even typing with our thumbs — aren’t creating different kinds of poetry? Speaking of poetry, where’s the copy editor on that weird sentence about a “pattern of being?” Also, what about a Prius what?
This is very interesting territory. Territory already covered — very interestingly — in the New York magazine cover story that Brooks, in this column, puts through the Brooksinator, with predictably tut-tut results that add little to the conversation. Territory that might be better re-explored by someone, dare I say, less corrosive toward poetry and imagination.
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Rihanna speaks out for the first time since that whole business with what’s-his-name, in the latest issue of Glamour:
